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flergum writes "Leonid Ksanfomaliti, an astronomer based at the Space Research Institute of Russia's Academy of Sciences, analyzed photographs taken by a Russian landing probe during 1982 and claims to have found signs of life. Ksanfomaliti says the Russian photographs depict objects resembling a 'disk,' a 'black flap' and a 'scorpion.'"

I find it more interesting that an astronomer is making the claim than say a biologist.It does seem very unlikely that a complex life from like a scorpion would live on Venus. If they do then it will be huge but the odds are really high that it is just an error.

Well if life developed along a similar pattern or if you believe the theory that there are certain "universal forms' like the conch that are simply the most efficient form and therefor will naturally be created then a scorpion would be a most likely early life form as one of the earliest life forms we have records on is Bronto Scorpio or the sea scorpion. The bigger question would be is if it is a scorpion what is its prey?

While I'd have to see more proof than some fuzzy pictures from 1982 as we humans are known for seeing shapes and trying to "fill in the blanks" I think its arrogant of us to believe all life had to develop the same way we did. just look at the life we've found living next to volcanic vents, that is a truly hellish place with water that would boil us alive yet there is thriving life under all that pressure and heat. of course if i were to hazard a guess I'd say Europa and Ganymede are more likely places to find life simply because there is a good chance there is liquid water and as we know water makes for a great medium for primordial soup,but who knows, maybe liquid methane or hydrogen under the right conditions could also make a primordial soup, who knows.

That is just it we do kind of know.Chemistry is the same everywhere. Take your idea about liquid hydrogen and liquid methane for example. Anyplace that is cold enough for those to exist are probably too cold for life. Life need energy and anyplace that cold will be by definition be energy poor.Venus is probably too hot. Again it comes down to chemistry. They type of reactions that are needed for what we call life just will not work at heat because molecules like proteins well just fall apart on in this case

But who is to say that life has to fit our definition? Take you comments about being "energy poor" for example, we know that many of the giants cause the moons to be tidal locked, that constant pull creates plenty of energy as we have seen with the fountains of Ganymede. And we once thought that nothing could live in the cold dark depths of the ocean under such "energy poor" conditions with the added burden of insane pressures yet the farther we go down the more life we find that has adapted, to steal a lin

Don't forget this is a 4th hand translated account we are getting here through the notoriously sensationalist media. There was probably a 30 page report in which the scientist outlined which optical effects could most likely result in such an effect on the image through camera error or heat distortion, and then a sentence like "there is a small possibility that the objects were moving of their own volition" which then got grabbed up and made the focus of a story. If you read something stupid in the media, try blaming the media first and the scientists only when you have seen 1) the evidence and 2) the actual conclusions of the scientist in their own words.

Careers can be ruined by this sort of thing, ignorant journalists and skeptical armchair scientists.

Slashdot eats degree symbols, even if encoded as HTML entities. Alas we cannot poke fun at people for that particular typographical wandering.

Neither the SI temperature unit (K) nor the most common (C) require a pesky degree symbol. As the internets is supposed to be worldwide and modern, perhaps chosing one of those units might have been more appropriate?

Drat. I read the article right through and forgot what I read twenty seconds earlier. Luckily I can change my mind given the fact I'm not a politician.

So yes, it's entirely possible the heat and atmospheric conditions caused distortion in the image. I wouldn't say distortion in the lens itself, because that would mean that would mean both distortion and restoration in specific pieces of the lens. It's also possible that something was in the image and later not. Something you can expect with 700 kph winds.

Mirage. Or easily explained by the distortion of a lens by heat in desert conditions - this one a scathing 1k F.

I doubt it. You need temperature variations in order to get this effect (hot ground, colder atmosphere) which is not going to happen on Venus, seeing as most of the heat and light is absorbed in the atmosphere before it touches the ground. You won't even get diurnal temperature variations, as the thermal capacity of the dense armosphere is quite significant, and finally, the convection will smooth out any local temperature inequalities. You simply never get the optical interface necessary for a mirage.

No pictures were included, so how can we form our own, uneducated, opinions???

This article from Ria Novosti [en.rian.ru] has one picture with attributions to the scientist and journal. I'm not sure what you're looking at but I am guessing that the object outside of the pod is not a device of theirs -- which leads to a lot of speculation and conjecture. I guess I don't know enough about their sensors/cameras that they were using in 1982 to say whether or not this was some sort of aberration or malfunction of the camera due to extreme temperatures. But that's about the best uneducated opinion I can offer you.

Scratch that, I just read some lengthy forums that say that's a shattered lens cap. Here's another panorama with said lens cap pieces [kozmedia.com]. The Daily Mail offers this strange image [dailymail.co.uk] as evidence... but that's The Daily Mail so take it with a grain of salt. If that is what all the fuss is about, I'm a little angry I just wasted this much time. Personally I'd assume my camera is experiencing an anomaly due to it being 867 degrees Fahrenheit outside...

Leonid Ksanfomaliti,...claims to have found signs of life...objects resembling... a scorpion

I haven't heard the Scorpions since the 80s. They were pretty good in their niche. Is this a reunion tour?

Nope. The summary specifies that the scientist's claims are based on 30-year-old photos, which means they may have been on Venus then (which isn't so far-fetched... they opened for a group called UFO in 1972 and their guitarist then joined UFO [wikipedia.org], so it's quite possible that the scientist saw a UFO who looked like a Scorpion because he used to be one), but according to Wikipedia they've been back for some time now. In fact, their tour at the time of these photos was called the Blackout Tour. Curiouser and curiouser.

The "signs" might be worth looking into, but I have to agree with you that those signs are more likely not life at all. Honestly I don't think Venus could support complex life anyways right now. If their is life it would be more like our Extremophiles and those are usually difficult for us to locate even on the Earth.

but on earth. We do pattern matching, even when there is none, we see shapes of gods in cluods, of the future in tea leaves, even faces in the moon and mars. This could have been totally random shapes. But of course, if it was life, specially one that are totally different from what we are used to see, could be a step forward for us, still too much people see earth as the center of the universe.

Sigh... I don't know if anything from Yahoo is even worthy of/. idle. The site is really a testament to what happens when a company stands still. Frequent users are almost exclusively people who landed there after AOL ceased to be a premiere destination (in popular culture). Just like Yahoo, they didn't upgrade and adapt. And that's why their user base is on the left side of the curve and their user-generated content is terrifyingly ignorant.

. . . he's right. What if there is life on Venus, but unlike ours? What if there is a lot of it? Would we, perhaps, be better off ignoring it? Seriously, are we ready for such a discovery? It may sound silly, but I think there is a large segment of the human population who couldn't deal with it.

While looking for more information about this Leonid guy, I came across this reference [dopotopa.com]:

The doctor in Physics and Mathematics from Institute of Space Investigations of the Russian Academy of Sciences Leonid Ksanfomaliti has come to an analogous conclusion: "I think, such could take place only under the influence of a radial instrument of a high technological level. Something like the future high-power laser. And for "artists" the lack of energy was not" - he has told at recent scientific conference "Horizons

I suppose there are some chances that some alien life would superficially resemble life on earth. But not likely. Any significant similarity would be more easily explained by a common ancestor. If there is no common ancestor, all bets are off, and since the mutation and selection pressures on another world would be completely different, the resulting life forms would be completely different. Sure, it's more likely than not that they'd be made of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, etc., and it's likely (because i

Come on guys, I have seen clouds shapped like a lion, like a baby etc. The ancient astronomers have seen a hunter, a scorpion, a bull, a big bear, a small bear, a girl, a lion etc etc for a long time in the skys with nothing more than a few pin pricks of light. When you have the imagination, you can see anything.

The key part isn't what shape it had, but that it kept its shape (with slight changes) over time and over multiple viewing angles, before leaving the area again. But the pictures are so grainy that I don't know that I would buy that bit, either. It certainly doesn't look scorpionish to me.

The ancient astronomers have seen a hunter, a scorpion, a bull, a big bear, a small bear, a girl, a lion etc etc for a long time in the skys with nothing more than a few pin pricks of light. When you have the imagination, you can see anything.

Your puny human vision requires to to have imagination, and when your sleep cycle scrubs your short term memory, committing important thoughts to longer term storage by way of randomized synapse firing & strengthening you DO "see anything". When conscious what you see as pins' prickings I see as enormous gravity furnaces that warp the very essence of the Universe and forge new stable configurations of energy (matter). Reality is stranger than fiction.

The greenhouse effect IS responsible for the high temperatures. This is why the temperature stays pretty much the same even on the dark side of the planet. Solar radiation comes in but radiates away very slowly. This is demonstrated by the night side temperatures, which are pretty much the same as the day side temperatures. This is also verified by the stratospheric temperature difference from the surface (the stratosphere is very cold, since little heat is escaping from the troposphere).

Density plays a part because it further reduces the rate of heat escaping. However, it is the CO2 gas that is key. An atmosphere of 95% Nitrogen, for example, would not be nearly as scorching and given the slow rotational rate, the night side of the planet would be bone chilling cold. Our own atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen, and without the various greenhouse gases (water vapor, CO2, methane, etc.) our planet would be a block of ice.

Scientifically, the trapping of the solar heat on Venus is caused by what is called a greenhouse effect (i.e., the trapping of outbound IR radiation), exactly the same in nature as the greenhouse effect on Earth, but much more efficient due to the considerably thicker atmosphere and different composition of Venus' atmosphere. This has been known since Mariner 2, in 1962.

The existence and importance of greenhouse effects for the Earth, Mars and Venus have all been verified for decades. There is absolutely no

The difference is huge. The percentages are similar, but the quantity of CO2 a photon goes through on the way to the surface of Venus is incredibly higher than the quantity of CO2 a photon goes through on the way to the surface of Mars. That pressure bit matters a lot.

I always wondered how long you could keep a baloon aloft on Venus. I would think you would be able to use thermal electric effect (peltier/stirling engine) of altitude vs surface heat to create energy and use the acidic clouds to maintain a lighter than CO2 gas for the baloon -- like a CO2 to SO2 converter or something.